Beauty and the Beast (guess which is which), from May 12, 1990.
And they said it’d never last. Ho, ho.
Today Herself and I celebrate 34 years of Holy Macaroni. She makes regular visits to the eye doctor so it’s not my fault. She’s either extremely tolerant or a secret drinker. P’raps both.
And for those of you who are mothers or had mothers, happy Mother’s Day. Ours were in attendance at the wedding in Hyde State Park up to Fanta Se (third and fourth from left, below) and neither of them disowned us, though mine considered it after I told her she couldn’t smoke in our house.
My sister, Peggy (far right) married Howard, a fine fellow and a Brainiac to boot, but decided against motherhood based upon having grown up alongside Your Humble Narrator, who never did.
And we are likewise without offspring because … seriously, have you ever read this blog? I mean, c’mon. Herself may need vision correction, but she does not lack perception.
Mary Pigeon and Mary Jane O’Grady discuss the pitfalls of procreation.
Shortly after we settled here back in September 2014 a handyman told me that The Duck! City was a much smaller town than one might think on short acquaintance.
On the surface, it seems a lot like Bibleburg or Tucson: All three are sprawling, medium-sized Western cities dependent upon military installations, universities, and tourism, with transient, ever-changing populations.
But dig a little deeper and The Duck! City feels more like Pueblo, where some folks really put down roots.
I don’t know that I ever met a native Tucsonan, and born-and-bred Bibleburgers were likewise rare. But in Pueblo, and The Duck! City, it’s easy to meet people whose attachment to location runs generations deep.
Longevity breeds networking, and this can work for you or against you. I took the handyman to be hinting that outlandish douchebaggery gets broadcast faster than a triple murder on local TV.
More often it’s a case of meeting some rando in the course of doing a bit of business and finding out that he or she knows everyone you know, and probably a whole lot better, too.
This was the case with the landscaper we engaged to tackle our back yard. North Valley guy, of an age with meself, and in one of our first chats it turned out that he knew more than a few of the guys I used to race bikes with when we lived in Fanta Se back in the late Eighties and early Nineties.
Then last night we’re chatting about the final touches to the project and learned that his mom saw the same doctor as Herself the Elder, lived in the same assisted-living home (albeit a few years earlier), and passed on there, just like HtE.
He knew the owner of the place, and the staff, and also was familiar with the operator of HtE’s previous digs, noting with discretion that he decided against housing his mom there.
A small town indeed. In a town this size, there’s no place to hide. Everywhere you go, you meet someone you know.
Her Royal Felinity, Miss Mia Sopaipilla, has retreated to the Winter Palace.
Forty-seven degrees is not what I would call cold, though it’s a few degrees cooler now than it was when she meowed me out of a sound sleep at 5:30 this morning.
Ordinarily it would be Herself who answers the call of duty at stupid-thirty, but she has gone a-questing to East Texas to join sisters Beth and Heather, other kinfolk, and friends in bidding adios to Herself the Elder, who is to be laid to rest tomorrow in the family plot.
Frankly, Miss Mia finds all this a feeble excuse for being short-staffed, nay, abandoned to the questionable care of a junior staffer who thinks that he belongs where she is now.
That’s treason, that is. Heads will roll, and they will not be cute gray furry ones with luxurious whiskers and fetching green eyes.
“When out of sorts, walk a hundred miles,” wrote Jim Harrison.
I only managed a hair over six miles, but then I’m not a lionized poet, author, and screenwriter describing the perambulations of Doug Peacock in “The Fast,” written for Smart magazine and collected in “Just Before Dark.” I’m just a retired free-range rumormonger who felt a tad frazzled after a week of backwash from the abrupt departure of Herself the Elder.
She was not my mother, and I am spastic in financial matters weightier than a crisp Jackson in the wallet, so with sister-in-law Beth in town to backstop Herself I felt my place was in the kitchen, feeding the women to keep their strength up as they rassled various fiscal and familial alligators. I think Jimbo would’ve approved.
I baked, sliced, toasted, and buttered bread; scrambled eggs and cooked oatmeal; sliced apples and assembled sandwiches; and made turkey chili with red kidney beans, a more substantial chicken posole verde, pasta with a mildly spicy sauce of tomatoes, garlic, onion, chile, and black olives, and spread the leftover sauce onto prefab shells for pizza.
Not exactly the labors of Heracles. Nothing out of the ordinary, really. I’d have done most of this cookery anyway, just over a longer period of time. But with Herself fetching a head cold home from her visit to Maryland, and Beth occupying the spare room we use to confine Miss Mia Sopaipilla at night, what sleep I’ve been able to scrape together between cookery, cleanup, coughs, and meows has been less than restful.
When yesterday proved to be a beautiful day, I decided to get outdoors for a while. But with the brain firing erratically trail running seemed iffy and cycling positively suicidal.
Looking west from the corner of trails 365 and 365A.
So instead I grabbed my hickory stick and took a two-and-a-half-hour skull-flushing stroll along the hem of the Sandias to the edge of the Cibola wilderness and back again.
The universe mostly accommodated my desire for relaxation, solitude, peace, and quiet, perhaps with an assist from the Albuquerque Police Department.
The APD is disbanding its Open Space Unit, dispersing its four officers and one sergeant to the mean streets of The Duck! City, and giving police service aides the responsibility for locking and unlocking trailhead gates.
This changing of the guard isn’t supposed to happen until February 2023. But maybe someone missed the memo, because the three parking lots I passed on my hike were locked up tight and as a consequence the foothills trails were mostly empty. I took a small water bottle and my own sweet time and thought not at all about food.
This afternoon the sisters are taking a break from estate management and eBaying to whip up a raspberry cobbler. Once that’s squared away Beth will prepare lobster tails, I’ll tackle the salmon, spuds, and asparagus, and Herself may or may not do a small green salad. It’s been a long week, and she’s still not 100 percent. We’re all tired. So it goes.
If you observe the holiday, or even if you don’t, give your loved ones a little more gravy on their taters, maybe a bigger slice of pie. A little sugar, don’t you know. Don’t forget to raise a glass to any empty seats around the table.
Herself the Elder, a.k.a. Mary Gaye (Kerr) Pigeon, went west on Thursday in Albuquerque. She was 89.
Born in 1933 on a farm in East Texas, the youngest of 10 children, Mary raised three girls of her own and spent a quarter-century working for Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU) in Oak Ridge, Tenn.
Her father, B Kerr, was a sharecropper. Her mother, Mary M. Kerr, was a homemaker.
Mary attended schools in Nacogdoches and Abilene, graduating from Abilene High School in 1951. Afterward she studied at Massey Business College in Nacogdoches.
In 1958 she married Robert Pigeon of Ontonagon, Mich.
Their first child, Beth, was born in 1960 in College Station, Texas. Shannon (Herself) was born a year later in Nacogdoches. And Heather was born in Frederick, Md., in 1962, after the family moved east so Robert could take a position with the Atomic Energy Commission.
With all three children in school, Mary went to work. In Frederick, she took a job with the First Baptist Church. When the family relocated to Oak Ridge in 1980, Mary signed on with the First Presbyterian Church.
Two years later, the couple divorced. Her ex eventually remarried, but Mary never did.
In 1992, Mary began working at ORAU, in a temporary position. It proved anything but. By the time she retired 23 years later — at the age of 82 — she was the executive assistant to a vice president in health communication. Mary loved that job and was proud of her accomplishments at ORAU.
Armed with quick wit and sharp tongue, Mary did not suffer fools gladly. But she had a lighter touch with animals, particularly cats, and supported the Helping Paws Animal Network of Oak Ridge.
She devoured mysteries on her Kindle, especially Susan Wittig Albert stories. Other pastimes included crossword puzzles, dining out, shopping, spending time with family and her wide circle of friends, and binge-watching episodes of “The Big Bang Theory.”
Beth, Mary and Shannon share a giggle in The Duck! City circa July 2021.
In her later years Mary wanted to be closer to her daughters, moving first to an apartment in Palm Bay, Fla., near Beth, and then to assisted living in Albuquerque, near Shannon.
She arrived in The Duck! City just as the novel coronavirus began triggering lockdowns in elder-care facilities, and endured quarantines in tiny rooms, conversations with loved ones through closed windows and/or over the phone, vaccinations, and masking, all piled atop the traditional indignities of advancing old age.
In her final year, with restrictions lifting, Mary was able to rejoin the wider world, enjoying in-person visits with family and friends, getting her hair and nails done, shopping, and going out for meals.
Shortly after her 89th birthday, COVID finally found her. It did not keep her long.
Survivors include Beth and Darren Morgan of Woodsboro, Md.; Shannon and Patrick O’Grady of Albuquerque; and Heather and Bill White of Smyrna, Tenn.; two grandchildren and five great-grandchildren; and several nieces and nephews.
No services are planned. Come spring, Mary will return to East Texas, where memory took her in her final days.
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